The Throw: an Introduction to Diagrammatics

THE THROW: AN INTRODUCTION TO DIAGRAMMATICS A Thesis Submitted to Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Ryan Jeffrey Johnson May, 2008 Thesis Written by Ryan Jeffrey Johnson B.A., Kent State University, 2006 M.A., Kent State Univeristy, 2008 __________________________________________, Advisor Gina Zavota __________________________________________, Chair, Department of Philosophy David Odell-Scott __________________________________________, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences John R.D. Stalvey ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………..iv INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………….1 Chapter I. Tracing over the Biographical Strata…………………………….6 1. An Overview of Diagrammatics…………………………….11 II. Foucault and Cartography……………………………………….20 1. Archaeological Maps………………………………………..20 2. The Genealogical Shift……………………………………....34 3. Cartography is Only the Second Moment in the Full Application of Diagrammatics……………………………….44 III. The Speed of Thought and a Fall of the Die……………………..62 1. Diagrammatic Apprenticeship……………………………….63 2. Paradoxical Becomings………………………………………72 3. A Throw of the Die and the Construction of a Diagram……..79 4. Infinite Egresses……………………………………………...89 5. Making Oneself a Diagrammatician………………………..102 IV. The Compound Gallery of Desire………………………………109 1. I……………………………………………………………..109 2. II…………………………………………………………….116 3. III……………………………………………………………126 V. Conclusion……………………………………………………...142 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………..144 iii Acknowledgements I would first of all like to thank Dr. Gina Zavota, my esteemed advisor, who put up with all of the purple language and chaotic departures from the topic of my thesis and kept me on track so that I could write a thesis with which I am almost completely satisfied. Gina has not only helped my career in uncountable ways but has also become a close friend. I would also like to thank Dr. Gene Pendleton and Dr. Navjotika Kumar; Dr. Pendleton has been without a doubt the most important teacher in my life, and has inspired in me an indefatigable intellectual curiosity, and Dr. Kumar’s wonderful lessons on twentieth century art have proved essential to my intellectual development. I would also like to thank Dr. David Odell-Scott for taking the time for helping my career and being kind enough to serve as a reader on my thesis defense board. Most of all, however, I would like to thank my loving girlfriend Charlotte and my wonderful parents Jeff and Claudia, who supported me at every step of the way with kind words and unconditional love. All of them have proven to be necessary to my success. I am deeply indebted to all of these people and more, for I am not an individuated atom but a mobile heterogeneous multiplicity of thoughts and movements. iv Introduction1 Diagrammatics is a rigorous, measured, disciplined, but not disciplinary, four-part process for breaking down dogmatic and static form of life. It is a process of leaving, of creation, of forgetting, of becoming, in which one becomes skilled at reading the formations of knowledge and existence in order not to perpetuate the order of things, but to discover a way of producing an anomaly, of finding a way beyond the apparatuses of capture so that one can venture into the outside. This does not mean that one should simply destroy every form of consistency that one comes across; rather it is necessary to keep portions of the traditional image of thought in order to remain alive, and not quickly descend into catatonia or fascism. For “if you force it too violently, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed…or even dragged toward catastrophe. Staying stratified…is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse.”2 A tracing is the normal way of doing things; it is the common mode of existence, just following the herd, responding to everything in the prescribed way. In this moment, there is little to no creativity; rather there is just rote repetition. Yet this moment is necessary; it is necessary to lodge oneself on the strata, in the culture, to find out how things are organized, how things go. For to blindly attack the stratum helps no one. In 1 This introduction is the summation of the first chapter in my thesis, which was supposed to act as an introduction but was not considered acceptable by my thesis defense committee, hence the repetitiveness. Therefore, this small introduction is required for passing the thesis requirement of the philosophy M.A. program. 2 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987, p. 161. 1 2 my thesis, my first chapter just traces over the same biographical stories of Foucault and Deleuze, merely giving the same information that anyone can find in a standard book on these two. Yet after this process is over, after one is familiar with the strata and discovers the opportunities it offers, one can being to experiment; and this is the beginning of the second moment: Foucauldian cartography. I have chosen Foucault to represent the second moment for many reasons. For one, his histories fit exactly the basic criteria of cartographic analysis. In this moment, we see how Foucault took the standard pictures of historical formations and began to shift the areas of importance, showing how multiple maps could stem from the same content. This is called cartographic because it is down through alternative colorations. If one were to map Kent, one could color the same place in different ways, color and re-color the same earth and produce different maps. The two conceptual tools that I have chosen to utilize in this moment are articulabilities and visibilities. For articulabilities, Foucault, in the early part of his career, performed archaeologies. Like uncovering ancient ruins and seeing how an ancient civilization was organized, Foucault sieves through the discourses of historical practices. I have chosen the discourse on madness as my main example; to see how things change and affect each other based on enunciative functions, which he calls statements. Statements are like lines or grids of a map that indicate the direction and patterns of practices through what is said of the objects in the discourse on madness. Statements are direction arrows that reveal the structuration of knowledge and discourses that condition the possibilities for 3 organization and practice. The statements surrounding the mad in the renaissance are different than the statements in the classical epoche. In this way, the maps that Foucault produces are organized by the effectuation of families of statements. With visibilities, the field of application is transformed by the ways in which the practices are visibly organized. Think of the ways different rooms have different moods by the ways that lighting is set up. In the prison, the organization of penal practices changes in terms of the ways that the prison, and eventually society, are made visible. Either with articulabilities or visibilities, the second moment, the transformational moment, takes the material generated by the first moment and destabilizes the hierarchical order predominant in traditional histories. The second moment is a process of becoming-minor, of altering the standard landscape and producing a discontinuous atlas of conflicting and disparate maps through radical cartographic diagnosis. But it is here that Foucault stops short, and where Deleuze comes on the scene with the introduction of the abstract diagram. While Foucault showed how multiple planes could be produced from the same content, always retaining the identities and distinctions of the maps, Deleuze abstracts even further. Now, in the place of categories or identities, there are only the potentialities for future actualization. The diagram provides the possibilities for a different reading, a mode of existence that is yet to come. The diagram is the dissolution of social forms, whether standard or alternative, which occurs by means of lines of flight that was opened up by Foucault’s splintering of the standard modes of life. 4 Perhaps the best way of thinking about the diagrammatic moment is to think of learning to swim. After spending time outside the sea or pool, going through the motions, learning the standard way of doing things, one must plunge into the sea. When one jumps into the dark abyss of the sea, one cannot just run through the old motions, but must mix with the singularities of the sea. Eventually, one reaches a breaking point, where previous training, while the necessary conditions, becomes burdensome, for if one tries to recall everything that was given him, he will drown. Rather, one must become the sea, hence the idea of becoming. One must forget the static distinctions separating the body and the sea, and become one with the sea, create a new assemblage consisting of flesh, bone, and water. In this way, life is pushed to a threshold, where new modes of existence will be produced. This is the encounter with the diagram insisting in the outside. From the diagram, new formations of assemblages can emerge. Identities are wiped away leaving only collections of affects. Once we are left with only potentialities for creation and organization, new forms can be produced, new patterns of life can be actualized. In the fourth chapter, the actualization of diagrammatics potentialities in a new program, I look at Picasso’s variations on Velasquez’s Las Meninas. Mirroring Foucault’s analysis of Velasquez’s original, as a way of looking at the classical age in The order of Things, I use Picasso’s variations as ways of harnessing the intensities and assemblages in order to jam the circuit. Diagrammatics, then, is a loose methodology for escaping normalization and revealing how one is complicit in the perpetuation of dominant historical structurations, 5 to pick up on the free movements that are later captured, normalized, and stratified, to shift things just a bit.

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